Elmore James was born in 1918 in Richland, Mississippi, in Holmes County, to a 15-year-old mother, Leola Brooks, and took his surname from Joe Willie Frost James. By age 12 he was making music on a diddley bow, a single piece of wire stretched tight and nailed to the wooden siding of a shack, with a glass bottle wedged underneath as a bridge. This episode explains how that one-string instrument forced him into the world of microtones and slide technique, and how he carried those mechanics to the six-string guitar, treating the entire neck as an extension of a single sliding wire. It follows his teenage years under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James, his study of Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and Tampa Red, his work with Sonny Boy Williamson II, and his service as a Navy coxswain in the Pacific, including the invasion of Guam.

The conv ...